How Malappuram Was Reimagined By Maneka Gandhi

The BJP leader’s remarks were far removed from reality. One can only think that the politician in her accepted data from mischievous providers and politicised the elephant death

- Paul Zacharia

Why would a politician of Maneka Gandhi’s standing speak without due diligence about an integral part of India and the people there? A senior leader of the BJP, she has been a Member of Parliament for over a quarter century and was minister in Vajpayee’s governments as also in Narendra Modi 1.0. Ms Gandhi is a well-known animal rights activist and author. The fact that neither she nor her son found a berth in Narendra Modi 2.0 doesn’t make her a political lightweight. Her Gandhi family connection commands a formidable ruling class legacy in contemporary Indian politics. However, it is her strident voice as an animal rights advocate and environmentalist that perhaps has greater reach than the political one.

It was Ms Gandhi the animal rights advocate who spoke those unkind words about Kerala’s Malappuram district. She was reacting to the horrendous incident of a pregnant wild elephant biting into a firecracker-filled fruit—an unpardonably cruel bait farmers set up to kill wild boars who attack their crops—and dying a painful death. Details of the gruesome event and the outcry that followed had deluged the national media and need no reiteration. Certainly it was Ms Gandhi’s entry into the scene that gave the incident national prominence. But her statements about Malappuram district were, to say the least, astonishing. The elephant did not die in Malappuram district but in adjoining Palakkad district. Ms Gandhi, however, in the course of several media interviews, made a series of remarks about the people and administration of Malappuram that went way beyond the issue of the elephant’s death.